of a king
by dragondark
Summary: A history of the goblin king: his birth and ascent to power.


disclaimer: If I owned the Labyrinth, there would have been a sequel a few years after it had come out.

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**of a king **

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Light.

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He woke in the dying embers of a hearth, heartless and motionless and eyelessly alive.

On the bare branch past an open window, an owl called tragically. He stirred. Out of the sound, out of sadness and salt and sparks, he carved for himself a shape and crawled from the crumbling ashes.

Ash flared, bitter on his tongue; the first word that rolled from his tongue into the soundless air was bitter. Wonderingly he tried another, another, another, hearing them clink.

Broken, he said.

Belief, he said.

Power, he said, and pieces flew together to carve words from the silence. Words descended like fetters from the air -- like promises to ring his hands, bracelet his wrists, lace about his throat. With each gathering word he felt the fire in the hearth whisper, speaking a language too muted to be heard.

He lifted his new hands to the moonlight. Light glittered darkly from his curving wicked nails, his smooth inhuman fingers.

Wish, he said. (_Oh, how I--_) The shadows closed around his hands, smothering the bleak startling glow from his fingers. He followed the dark into the corners, feeling a smile prick at the edges of his forming lips, a face taking shape from movement.

Memory, he said. (A girl raving tears over a fire: _if only the baby weren't here, if only it were but my father and I again, if only if only if only--_)

The hearth sputtered and fell silent. New fire spilled through his veins: to serve the house, the family, to give them what they yearned for. Every word cried out between their walls, every faint helpless desire, tore from the bones of the house and drowned in him to raise some murky power from the dark. His eyes flashed a wicked answer at the moon.

Love, he said -- the last word -- and threw his head back to laugh as he melted slowly into the house.

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They left milk on their porches to tempt some fairy servitor, warded their windows with herbs strung from the ceilings and crosses at every door. He snarled scorchmarks through the leaves, soured the milk for the morning and taunted the child still caged in his cradle until the babe sobbed fit to wake them all. He sang wild haunting songs that ghosted through the house in unexpected angles, he brought the whispers of old gossip home from the market to break their hearts, he shattered and unwove the charms they brought home against him.

It was not enough.

In distant nights he could still hear the voice of the crying girl, wailing:_ she took him from me, she took him! The only person who remembered my mother as she was and she's making him forget, he'll never remember again, he's changing everything for the sake of the baby and his new life and what place have I here now? Where will I go without him? _

He could not find her. He worked on in hopes that she would return to see his mischief. He wove an intricate pattern of tapestry at the loom one day and tore it down the next; he whirled through the pantry in a frenzy of appetite and left ratlike bites on every morsel; he guided vermin and insects under their beds in the house and listened for the shrieks. But every word he swallowed echoed empty down his throat, empty in his chest. He could taste no pleasure from their tears, could see no delight in the hairs he tore from their heads.

Only the baby, gleaming fat and full in the moonlight, seemed real enough to sate him. But he could not touch the child. Chiseled from tears and wishes and bound to their house, as a fairy servant he could only take what was offered to him in the family.

And yet...

He ceased teasing them, and lay in wait.

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Not before long, the daughter returned from her trip to the city, arms laden with baskets and her dimpled face cooled to dignity as she looked at her father's new child. She was not beautiful at all; he could not see the tracks where the tears that had carved him from dust, the want that had shaped him, might have been. She was oddly pale, with a child's chin and round light eyes, and swinging dark hair like a cosseted child herself.

And the advantage of children was how easily they were led.

That night, he lulled her to sleep with desires: _how much better if he were gone, if he had never existed, that child only half-mine... how much sweeter the morning air if he were not there to breathe it... _

Under the moonlight, he spoke on beside her bed, those words and a thousand more, before she bolted upright from a dream.

Her eyes still hazy with sleep, she whispered, "Ah, I can bear it no longer... if only someone would take the child from me..."

The bonds that held him prisoner and servant, unable to carry them off, loosed; without delay he darted into the room where the babe lay slack and exhausted, and swept the child into his arms.

Then, silence.

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How delicious, he learned, the taste of blood, the crunch of tiny bones underneath his sharpening teeth.

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Seeing how they wept over the bones he left scattered through the forest, how their faces slowly smoothed in the funeral procession, his long fingers curled on the bark of a tree. Some stifled unease muttered under his blood. If he, he thought, kept the baby for longer, if he held the child and taunted them, he could stretch out their despair to weeks - oh, delicious weeks! - and consume it languorously, at his leisure. How much sweeter their despair over the meaty sustenance of child.

If he gave them the chance to bring the child back, he thought, rocking on his heels like a boy himself. But how?

His eyes found the girl, with her dark and tearless face. His nails carved vicious tracks through the bark, and he began to smile.

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Rumors and myths of the child-snatchers had already begun by the time of the thirteenth babe he stole - of a creature that would take either the babe or the one chosen to rescue, but would never permit both to return. In the dark he drank in their old terrors and walked in the spaces where their beliefs had first formed, seeing the haze of an unformed mystery graze low on the ground.

He could see out of the corner of his eyes the creeping gnarled forms of the children he had stolen before her; their misery guttered like power under his skin, and he exhaled a smile.

He hid the girl in the mist, furling walls of solid shadows around him. They took shape at his touch, hardening into bones mortared with blood, into walls hung with swords and needles pricking like thorns from their midst. He watched as the doors - new-formed iron - swung slowly shut, and he sang lullabies to twine about the girl's echoing cries as he walked out of that world.

He left clues and pieces of answers in the dreams of the local witch. They made patches of a summoning ritual came half out of vaguely-recalled superstition - though he did not know how he knew it - and nightmares not his own. He waited as they daubed the circle on the floor of the hut in blood, as they flung salt out every window and burned herbs in the hearth.

Dashing the ashes into the blood, they sang him to them thrice. On the third cry, he appeared.

The girl stood with her fists clenched to watch him. "I've changed my mind," she said, but there was something fierce and wrong about her eyes. "Give my sister back."

But what would she give him in return?

"Nothing! I didn't mean to want for her to be gone, and now I want her back." Her voice was high and thin, cracking like a boy's with that whiplash uncertainty. "I'll -- take me if you want. Just give her back."

He considered her without answering - the slim hands, the unlikely grace of her crooked nose, the gaps of bare dark skin in her ill-fitted clothes - but there was no question. Still bound by those rules of his long-ago days as an old goblin himself before blood and belief took their toll, he was obligated to honor in his bargains. Unless he could get her to break hers...

At present they stood on equal footing. If he could get her to take the child without consenting to come with him, as she had just done, he would be free to wreak havoc however he pleased on humanity, the last fetter of honor between races shattered. And she would; he had given precise instructions to the witch as to how to 'bind' him, in her dreams...

The girl rippled into place in the circle of his arms, in the ritual circle. Outside, her sister gave a small cry and would have run forth, but for the witch.

She stood thin and straight and dark by the hearth. Feeling his eyes on her back, she turned, and he saw the flaw in her eyes: she was blind, though he had sent her dreams of sight.

Catching his mistake, he turned to disappear, but it had already fallen past his time. The witch flung a packet into the fire, which exploded. Eyes scorched by light to blindness, he stumbled and felt the stolen girl slip from his arms, out and away.

"If you take his name, he will be at your mercy," he heard the witch tell the older girl as he writhed and struggled for sight on the floor. Never in a century had he been touched or confronted; so the light - so like the heart of the fire - bore him down easily. "If he has no name, you can name him yourself and bend him to your will. No fairy can withstand the power of having their own true names be known; it is where he might be broken."

A moment's hesitation, he thought. A moment's hesitation and he would be free.

A split-second's silence, but not long enough. The girl said, "Jareth."

"What?" Something rasped unnaturally in his throat, like moth's wings undigested. He realised that it was his voice.

"I said, Jareth," she repeated. "Your name is Jareth."

Her voice thundered about him like a chain.

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Reeling and restrained, he stumbled from the circle and into the forest, hearing the witch's laughter and the girl's echoing behind him. Forbidden to steal children. His kingdom to be shattered and every child restored to the dry and arid earth where they should have been a century ago. Sentenced to death in a faraway land.

He could already feel the maze withering inside his head, bones crumbling to dust and blood running in rivulets to a lake far from where he might contain it. His feet - and he was formed now, defined as humans were defined with only a faint sharpness to his teeth to remind him of what he had been - were finding their stumbling way to a distant shore that would take him far from here.

They had trapped him through power, he thought. It could not be broken by cleverness, since neither he nor any of the stolen children could be sent back to confront the witch on grounds where he had already been defeated. But power could break power. Although he lacked it now, power could be found.

The power of his name, he thought, might be weakened if it were not a secret. If it were not believed.

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In England he visited the descendent of a man who had once wronged his first family and whose vengeance he could claim: a playwright, a bearded man with cool eyes and a pointed dark beard spotted with silver. In England, where goblins were shapeshifters, he took the shape of an owl to watch the man as he journeyed through the city, and finally into the park.

His wings stilled as the man drew close beneath him, his long frame taut with wonder. He watched back, unblinking.

He allowed himself to be sketched, to be framed in poetry and wrought with verse. He waited through the weeks, seeing the man return home to his children, his ink-spotted hands stilled over parchment before flinging an inkwell at a wall, before he moved.

It started in whispers and worked through the playwright's mind like venom. Sweet and bitter and vivid, it ribboned through his feverish dreams and pulled his nightmares through his waking moments. Knights grown up as boys together turned on each other to fight in his dreams; unfaithful wives slid poison into their husbands' evening wine with an offer of a honeyed kiss; children came to slaughter their parents for their inheritances.

The playwright wandered, red-eyed and dazed, through mazy corridors and hissing crowds, and did not think to doubt himself until Jareth made one of his children's faces take the shape of a bull's head with snake's eyes before him. The mark he left on the boy's cheek clung to his thoughts, stole inexorably through to demand every iota of his attention.

On the ninth night, Jareth appeared.

"I would ask for so little," he whispered; "just a story -- a story, you see." And he smiled to see the man fumble to write, his knuckles bitten bloody and his hands slipping with terror and shamed delight at being able to write again.

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With every child that learned his name and spoke it contemptuously, disbelievingly, he felt the power of it ebbing over him, even as wishes scrabbled at his skin, yearning, craving, demanding fulfillment. He toyed with the lighting in the theater, dimmed it through the curtains or caused a sudden flare as dramatic irony required.

On the night before the thirteenth performance, the playwright killed himself.

In the onslaught of uncertainty, no one noticed the vanishing of an old trinket brought over from Egypt and a pair of velvet gloves.

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Year by year by year; the centuries passed. The labyrinth grew names and larger, consuming the idea of a garden and swamp and hands and thorns and rakes and baskets and more, more, always more.

The bones of the play altered slowly to stone-certainty, though he did not think of them as he had once thought of his name. They were terms that _he_ had defined.

And Jareth was satisfied.

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A rainy day in the park, growing tired once more of his strange twisted realms, he looked for another child to take.

"Oh, Sarah!" A low and rippling laugh; the owl shuffled around. Its liquid eyes reflected a girl-child with laughing shadowy eyes, a rounded pale face flushed pink with delight, her dark hair swinging round to frame her face.

The owl's feathers ruffled and bristled. Recognition rang electric in his veins. The Sarah-child had the face of the girl who had summoned him, whose tears had made the salt that had formed his bones, with which he had crawled out of the hearth.

The Sarah-child herself was too old to be stolen. But there were gaps that might allow for another child: her father, walking too stiffly beside them as mother danced with child. The faraway man lounging against the bench wearing velvet gloves like Jareth's own, watching Sarah's mother, looking rather like the owl himself with haughty brows and bright wild hair.

A storm rumbled low in the distance. The owl swept its wings open and soared from sight, eyes gleaming wildfire.

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Rain lashed and beaded the glass with silver, muting the sharp quarrels of the couple indoors. Their child fitfully asleep upstairs, only they and an owl played witness to the scene. They argued sharply, he with his teeth, she with her hands and her hair straggling furiously, back and forth through the rooms, pacing through the worn halls with their voices raised.

The picture of a bright-haired man was dashed against the wall; his grin splintered to fragments of glass.

The owl had already started to find his shape.

To the open window and the fading beats of the owl's wings, the Sarah-child -- no longer quite such a child anymore -- whispered a plea.

He smiled his sharp, mean grin. "What's said," he said gently, "is said."

_Forget about the baby. _

And darkness.

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notes: The blond man in the park is someone I borrowed from one of the popular theories(?) in Labyrinth-fandom -- namely, that Sarah's mother was having an affair with one of her actor friends, who looked a lot like Jareth. Since I'm not terribly keen on the idea that all of the Labyrinth sprang from Sarah's subconscious, I reasoned out Jareth's similar appearance this way. Take it with a grain of salt.

The word 'goblin' was a corruption of the German word 'kobold' -- the name for a creature bound to serve in a house. I took Jareth's origins from that idea.

feedback: makes my day every time I see some.


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